Interactive Sorting Within Reporting Services - Page 5

December 19, 2005

Procedure: Add Support for Interactive Sorting in a Relational
Report

Conditional sorting
could, of course, be added to our report via the method we undertook in Black Belt Components: Ad Hoc Sorting with Parameters, However, as we have already
noted, our specific focus in
this section will be the addition of support for interactive sorting through
leveraging new properties settings.

Let's open our new report in Layout view and make the
necessary settings to support the interactive sorting capabilities
requested by the information consumers.

1.
Right-click RS024_Interactive
Sort.rdl in the Solution Explorer.

2.
Select Open
from the context menu that appears, as shown in Illustration 17.

Illustration 17: Opening
the New Report ...

RS024_Interactive
Sort.rdl opens in
Layout view, and appears as depicted in Illustration 18.

The
checkmark appears in the check box, indicating that interactive sort is
enabled.

9.
In the Sort
expression box that appears immediately underneath the check box, select
the following from the options that appear within the selector:

=Fields!LineTotal.Value

10.
In the section
just below the Sort expression box, labeled Data region or grouping
to sort, click the radio button labeled Choose data region or grouping.

11.
In the
selector just below the radio button, select the following item:

SalesOrderDetail

12.
Leave the
radio button to the left of Detail scope, in the section labeled Evaluate
sort expression in this scope, at the default, selected setting.

We
leave the Detail scope selection in place as we intend only to sort the
repeating rows of the data region we have selected. Had the need arisen, we might
have specified another data region or group upon which to enact our sorts.

The Interactive
Sort tab of the Textbox Properties dialog appears as shown in Illustration
21.